"Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non–narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the 'trance film,' in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open–ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted 'to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.'

Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant–garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant–garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s."

(MoMA, 2004)

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999.

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"There are a number of ways in which text–based narrative content can be synthesized and analyzed to generate more quantitatively oriented findings. Common approaches involve attaching descriptors like tags (keywords) or indexes (retrieving concepts) or extracting thematic patterns as 'codes' (commonalities). The content author or a researcher can manually code content by looking for recurring ideas or subjects, or use Internet tools to attach tags to narrative content. One system developed by 'Cognitive Edge' applies semi–structured tagging to narrative content to generate 'numerical data with rich context' (Snowden)."

(Eleanor Herriman, p.3–4)

Fig.1 James 's Public Gallery [https://picasaweb.google.com/ilmainstreetleaders] 'People broke up into small groups to share personal health care stories. Stephanie Arnet and her daughter, Satwant and Onkar Dhillon and Debbie Miller.'